Can the Public Health Effort Do More?
In 2005, Washington University called diabetes an epidemic, and requested an NIH grant to study ginseng and its blood sugar modulating effects. They predicted 10% of the US population would be type II diabetic within the year. Their predictions have proven to be all too accurate. US health officials have indicated that the rate of new type II diabetes cases in the US soared by 90% in the past decade. The problem is most common in the southern states where rates of obesity are skyrocketing. Even the American Diabetes Association indicates the rates of diabetes have yet to level.
While the diagnosis often shortens lives and creates a complex web of additional complications that range from neuropathy, retinopathy, kidney dysfunction, and wounds that fail to heal (leading to 150,000 amputations in the US each year), there is a staggering financial toll. Two new federally funded studies published in the current Archives of Internal Medicine reveal that diabetic Americans doubled their spending on drugs for their disease in the last six years. Last year’s bill was an eye-popping $12.5 billion.
More patients got multiple drugs as new classes of drugs came onto the market. Yet few studies lasted longer than six months. And findings indicate that the widely prescribed Avandia may increase the risk of heart disease death. Avandia costs nearly eight times the bill for generic metformin per month. The FDA has received a petition to ban Avandia after the American Diabetes Association and the European Association for the Study of Diabetes unanimously advised against using Avandia.
Most puzzling of all is the lack of attention to the thirty years of government funded research on chromium and blood sugar control and insulin sensitivity. The research from Walter Willett, M.D., and his colleagues at Harvard, and the latest research published in the scientific journal of the American Physical Therapy Association, demonstrate that patients with diabetes who participated in a program that combined aerobic exercise with resistance training demonstrated improved blood sugar control, physical performance, and body fat composition.
Integrative physicians have been the targets of their respective state boards of medicine for decades because of their emphasis on lifestyle-based medicine combined with clinical nutrition. Their success rate exceeds 90%. Find an integrative physician in your area.